Tuesday, 25 December 2012

"They don't really care about us."

Note: This post is a follow-up to an earlier post (click here), wherein I've made certain preliminary arguments on the Delhi gang-rape & murder incident.

A thought has been bothering me for quite some time
now: I’m not sufficiently anti-establishmentarian enough; that, after a point,
I’d still be willing to invest whatever little bit of faith I have in my
reserves in the machinery of the state, rather than ideologues, demagogues and
the so-called civil society. That illusion has shattered.

That’s the first failure. Unfortunately, there have
been several more, far too many for me to articulate in this space.

Three problems

Three things that have bothered me, more so with
respect to the aftermath of this incident: The first of course is the way in
which the media manufactures conscience and outrage (my incredibly crass
interpretation of Chomsky’s “propaganda model”; I refuse to call it
the “press” or “journalism” because those values, I believe, are entirely
absent in public discourse). The industrial nature of the news media requires
this manufacturing of conscience; it doesn't care about causes. It
happened with the deaths of Keenan and Rueben in Amboli last year;
with the Guwahati assault earlier this year; and now, the
Delhi gang-rape incident. I’m not commenting on the good or bad of reporting:
clearly, some channels and papers are providing exceptional coverage of the
incident. But very few manage to break away from this discourse of
manufacturing conscience. However, since I've dealt with this issue
sufficiently, I shall not bother the reader with any more polemics against the
media.

My second problem is with the ideological response
to the incident, primarily by politically motivated groups – like the BJP, or
the ABVP, or Kejriwal’s Aam Admi Party – they have, all of them, hopped on to
the “dissing-the-government” bandwagon. For them, essentially, this
case isn't any different from the FDI in retail, the 2G spectrum
allocation scam, the coal block allocation scam, or any of the UPA’s other
bluders, for that matter: they are at India Gate to garner political mileage.
This is political posturing at its worse, and its most crass levels. In a
Kafila, post arguing against this political double standard-ness, Shuddhabrata Sengupta decimates Sushma
Swaraj’s callous comments on the nature of the crime; Swaraj, who said that
rape is “worse than death”, and the victim was “zinda lash” or a living
corpse, Sengupta argues, is actually “endorsing the patriarchal value system
that produces rape”, and that she and the rapist “are in perfect agreement
about the worth of the life of a rape victim”. In another Kafila article, Pratiksha Baxi argues
that the right-wing politician is “not concerned with how a strident Hindu
nationalism is built on the violated bodies of women”. No one in the BJP (or
anywhere else, for that matter) cared sufficiently about Dalit girls being
raped and set on fire in Haryana; or when women in the North East, like
Manorama, continue to raped, molested and killed by army men and paramilitary
forces; or in the Naxal-affected areas, when policemen are engaged in custodial
rapes; or when politicians and their goons get away with rapes, and get elected
into parliament. Unfortunately, rape is reduced to the violation of the woman’s
honour; as an aberration to the normalcy of things, where ‘normal’ is defined
as a state where women and marginalised groups blindly accept their
exploitation and maintain the status quo.

Third, and finally, I have a problem with the state’s violent action against the protestors at India Gate.
Make no mistake, I’ve never taken warmly to protests, marches, vigils and all
that; there’s a deep sense of scepticism I have towards “well meaning” civil
society action; but a deeper sense of disillusionment at the failure of
governance: something I've called a governance of paranoia –
wherein the political (and powered) class is informed by illogical reactionism,
and not a coherent ideological standpoint. This is not to suggest that the
problem is merely anti ideological. It is the failure on the part of
ideologies, and modes of governance to adapt, to say: “We were wrong”. Because
it is precisely this posturing, this ambivalence in governance, this resistance
to acknowledge the truth that “the emperor has no clothes”, is
what maintains the illusion of power. I concede that this argument is
incredibly complex, but I shall attempt to deal with it further on.

Disparate discourses

There is a parallel I see in the Delhi police commissioner,
Neeraj Kumar’s, insistence on not acknowledging the fact that the police
screwed up at India gate (and on several occasions in the past), and in the National Rifle Association’s unapologetic stance
(summed up with the ridiculous reasoning: “Guns don't kill people, people do”)
in the aftermath of the Sandy Hooks shooting massacre in Connecticut,
just over a week ago. These are disparate incidents, separated by thousands of
miles and, on the face of it, have no commonality. Yet, I believe that they are
deeply connected. For one, the brutality of shootings and rapes are borne
directly by marginal groups, in this case, children, students, and women –
groups that require the state’s protection, by any standard of liberal
democracies. Secondly, and unfortunately, both the United States government and
the Indian state have, time and again, refused to acknowledge
the chronic nature of the problems of gun-proliferation and shootouts, and
rapes, respectively; nor have they offered any long term solutions; from President
Obama’s teary eyes to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s incoherent and, ultimately,
inconsequential mumbling, the state, in both cases and countries,
has simply sidestepped the issue, proffering only symptomatic solutions and
empty rhetoric. Right-wing ideology and patriarchy are powerful ideologies, no
doubt. However, that fact that a sovereign nation should so consistently fail
to keep both in check is staggering, unless, of course, there is a deeper
problem in the very nature of governance itself.

What we've got here, is failure of governance

Clearly, I’m disillusioned with both major parties
in this struggle: the protestors, and the state. My scepticism of the Delhi
protests is informed by two major ideas: one,
is the criticisms levelled against civil society by the Slovenian philosopher,
Slavoj Žižek; and idea of the “political society” formulated by the subaltern
studies scholar, Partha Chatterjee. While Žižek’s criticisms are
founded more on the ideological nature of civil society in his native Slovenia,
Chatterjee, being much closer to home, offers more relevant insights. That the
nation is following the India Gate protests so closely; that many such protests
are being replicated across the country, in Bangalore, in Mumbai, and other
cities, is what Chatterjee calls the domain of the “civil society”. Opposed to
this civil society is the “political society”, i.e., the social groups like
Dalits, de-notified tribes, slum dwellers, who negotiate with governing
agencies, usually bureaucrats, low level civil servants, but people who
exercise considerable power at the micro-level (my apologies to Partha
Chatterjee for reducing his arguments to this dichotomy, but I've done so for
the sake of better comprehension).

I’ve had the chance to observe such negotiations
first hand on several research projects: where people living in bastis spend
every day without the certainty of work, or that their makeshift houses would
be standing by the time they get home from work. There have been many incidents
of rapes in similar areas across the country, most of them usually go
unreported, or are a column in newspapers which dedicate full pages to
advertisements. Things are worse in states like Orissa, or the North East,
where atrocities are carried out against women like clockwork. The brutal
nature of the crimes against these women, many of whom brave tremendous odds to
fight for justice (for instance the International People’s Tribunal on Human
Rights and Justice in Kashmir has done commendable work in the Shopian
murder-rape case), does indeed unite them in a discourse of
resistance.

Despite of all my cynicism and scepticism, I
empathised with the protesters at Delhi; while I do not endorse their views, I
do share their anger, their frustration, their angst and their fears. From the
ground at Raisina Hill and India Gate, Nilanjana Roy and Aditya Nigam wrote that the protestors were
anything but violent in the initial phase, and that they did wish to engage in
dialogue with the administration, before the police started lobbing tear gas,
that is. Why, then, did the administration, in this case, the Delhi police, not
engage in dialogue with the protestors? Why must the Indian state’s response
always oscillate between abject apathy and excessive brutality? I suspect it is
because the very nature of governance, as I mentioned before, is based on
the insistence that the emperor is indeed
clothed – and the Indian state insists on insisting with tear gas,
water cannons, lathi charges and Section 144.

Rape, then, is a political tool
against dissent: it is an articulation of violence, of intolerance, of the
severest insensitivity; of patriarchal governmentality’s recourse to
extrajudicial means to crush any and all levels of transgression, political,
social, or otherwise. Delhi police’s action against the protestors at India
Gate was rape; it was an assault on democracy; it was a step into a fascist
future, right alongside the demands for death penalties and castrations; it was
an act of violence which endangers not just women’s safety and rights in our
country, but that of citizens’ altogether; particularly social groups which do
not have access to media coverage, let alone the posturing of political
parties, or the sympathies of the general Indian public. And the failure to
acknowledge the fact that rape is a problem - that it is not about
sex; nor is it about "men assaulting women", orabout
morality; that it is used to further political agenda, to
silence dissent, to obfuscate the nuanced nature of violence, is a muted
justification and a shameless vilification of rape.

“They don’t really care about us”

The patriarchal nation-state, the elite civil
society and misogynistic political ideologies, by their nature, are inimical to
the discourse of women’s access to rights, to address the burning issue of
violence against them. Violence against women, in this case rape (‘women’ being
incredibly fissured category) is either a political tool itself, or is of
absolutely no concern to the parties I mentioned above. Women claiming to speak
for women, like the BJP MLAs, propagate the patriarchal ideology of
subordination of women by placing a price on their honour and chastity;
families would seek to police women, restrict their mobility; the state, as we
have clearly established, fails on so many levels – failing to ensure
protection, and at the same time, violating it; civil society, on the other
hand, is limited by the very narrow nature of its interest; and as for
academia, well, I certainly can vouch for the feeling of helpless that has
gripped me.

Who, then, speaks for the women? Who cares for
them? Are women, as many feminist scholars argue, merely property in the
patriarchal political economy? – To be terminated as a foetus, or be killed
before they have a chance to live? – That raped women, or those who exercise
their sexual freedom, are “damaged goods”?

At this point, I have nothing better to offer than
a handful of these questions: questions that I hope someone would answer; or,
more importantly, that someone would ask. Personally, I have no
hopes for an answer. I am angry, and at the same time, I am reflecting back on
my masculinity, on the assumptions that society has thwarted on my gender.
Unfortunately, I do not know how many men out there are doing so. Responding to
my previous post, one of my professors suggested that rape is a man’s
burden…that there is actually soul searching to be done by every man, because
at some point in our lives we have all done violence to women. I want to disagree
with this, but I know that I can’t: for, not speaking
against injustice is also to exacerbate it, if not to partake in it. That is
one of the reasons why I write. But, if ever the process of writing was
cathartic, it has now ceased to be so.

Acknowledgements: First
of all, I would like to express my gratitude to everyone who read, and
commented on, the earlier post: their comments and responses have been
incredibly motivational. To Shubhra Rishi, for once again being critical and
supportive, and for the engaging discussions over GTalk; to my teacher, Fr.
Joseph, to whom I am indebted for the sociological nature of my arguments; to
my class mates, particularly Natasha Patel, Tasneem Kakal and Simone Salazar.
And, finally, to Runcil Rebello, Achyuth Sankar and Anubhav Dasgupta for being
such avid readers, and for all the 'Shares' and 'Tweets'.